W.E.B. Du Bois: “The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom.”

One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Many of the worst characteristics of the Negro masses of to-day had their seed in this period of the slave’s ethical growth.

Yet even then the hard ruthless rape of the land began to tell.

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.